Customer relationship management (CRM) tools tackle plenty of issues across multiple industries. The real estate industry is no exception to this. Being a high capital investment industry, real estate businesses suffer heavily from mistakes that can be avoided through effective customer engagement and data management.
CRM systems offer solutions to these exact issues. Research shows that applying CRM to real estate increases sales by 29%, sales productivity by 34%, and sales accuracy by 42%. Despite this, real estate’s CRM adoption rate is still low. The poor awareness and low CRM usage can be attributed to the factors mentioned below as per a survey
This article will address the different problems that CRM solutions can solve, thereby raising awareness of its use in the real estate industry.
Major problems in real estate business?
Unlike other industries and businesses, the Real estate business is conventional in its approach; therefore has not caught on to the adoption of technology and digital transformation. Naturally, there have been drawbacks of increased manual intervention at every stage of the value chain.
Below are some problems faced by a typical real estate business and how they can be resolved using a CRM solution:
1. Lead tracking and monitoring
Owing to the traditional nature of the business, real estate companies have a manual approach to dealing with inquiries and leads management. As a result, if a lead is not fruitful in the present day, there exists no mechanism to track this lead for future opportunities.
CRMs help solve this problem by keeping track of the various interactions with prospective customers, thus, creating a pipeline of leads for future engagements. It can also help gauge the success of an offering or a campaign with a rich collection of user responses under a single platform. While individual responses for campaigns may not be particularly helpful, having an aggregate of responses can help identify key trends and user behaviors to better curate your approach to the customer.
2. Improper marketing
One of the problems in real estate business can face not having enough data and analytics on user behavior is the lack of understanding of what customers want. This results in vague marketing campaigns and solutions that do not cater to core customer needs. Ultimately, customers will not see value in the product offering and resulting in lost sales.
With a CRM solution, customers can be bucketed into different categories using the aggregated data. As a result, marketing campaigns can now be more targeted, even including various campaigns for different subgroups. This will result in a higher conversion ratio.
3. Invoicing and billing management issues
Another issue associated with manual processes is bookkeeping. Large capital investments, customers will want to ensure proper tracking of their expenses, resulting in multiple detailed billing requests. Having to go through this tracking process manually for each request can be tedious and inefficient.
CRM solutions help maintain different user profiles, which enable the collection of associated invoices and bills under a single header. Thus the hassle associated with tracking down multiple billing requests becomes a lot easier for both parties.
4. Forecasting errors
The greatest challenge for real estate establishments is to accurately forecast future demands. With the high initial investment, a company cannot afford to overshoot the demand. Nor would they want to undercut the demand given that every sale would move the revenue metric significantly.
With an effective CRM tool, companies now have significant knowledge of their target market, thereby making accurate future demand forecasts.
5. Broken customer contact management
Contact management extends to more than just prospective clients. Once a customer has expressed interest, it would be essential to ensure a smooth flow of communication through to the customer both during and after the sale.
CRMs ensure that with each customer profile, all conversations associated are tagged under a single file thereby ensuring easy and consistent customer communication. You can even create automated messages and standard templates to interact with the customers without leaving them unattended.
6. Booking errors
Most real estate agencies use a manual booking method. Thus, scenarios arise where two different bookings are accepted for a single unit. another possibility and problems in real estate business are booking an incorrect unit due to human error. A booking error can affect real estate agencies both immediately (in the form of refunds) and in the long run (in the form of bad word of mouth and lost sales).
CRMs help automate this process, thereby removing the risks associated with human interventions.
7. Managing different location property
Larger real estate firms often have multiple properties spread across geographies. Without a property management system, these companies will need to spend on individual property dealers, both expensive and difficult to manage.
Having a CRM centralizes the management of properties across multiple locations, saving costs as well as improving efficiency.
8. Agent commission management
With an increase in the number of properties comes, there comes an increase in real estate agents seeking commissions. While it is true that the more, the merrier as they will help sell off your units faster, managing commissions across a large number of individuals can be a difficult task
CRMs can automate agent commissions who can now enter their sales and leads through the system. This process will now be seamless with commissions credited directly to agents once a booking is successful – without any human intervention.
9. Pricing details of properties
With multiple properties comes the need to track the pricing across each property. Having individuals track this would be a huge waste of resources.
CRM helps save all the data under one roof, making it easier for all stakeholders to get the information they need.
Top Rated real estate CRM tools
Now that we’ve seen how CRMs can effectively improve the real estate business, below are some highly-rated CRM tools catering to this vertical:
1. DaeBuild Real Estate CRM
DaeBuild Real Estate CRM Offers robust leads management, sales management, manage customer accounts, Documents, Broker records, Staff management, sales automation, and customer management features.
2. RSquare
RSquare is an exclusive real estate web application, Specializes in managing a large set of properties and associated inquires, transactions, visits, and order bookings.
3. LeadSquare
LeadSquare Real Estate software Offers a wide range of solutions applicable across multiple industries and comes with both online and offline training and support.
The Final take on real estate CRM tools
As we can see, CRM tools can go a long way in reducing the overhead costs associated with the company as well as the sales cycle times so that agencies can get their return on investment at a much faster rate. CRM tools offer the first and most crucial step towards the digital transformation of a legacy business overly dependent on human intervention.
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